Stone Age Project

Well, I might as well start this blog with a bang. On August 1st I headed into the mountains with seven other people to spend the whole month at the stone age level. To that end, we had all prepared for two months, making everything we were going to need on the trip: we gathered and dried wild plants and berries; slaughtered a buffalo; made jerky and pemmican; brain-tanned deer, elk, and moose hides to make moccasins, clothes, bags, boxes, and rope; made stone and bone tools; made baskets and backpacks out of tree bark and branches; made hide glue, made a fishing line out of horse hair; felted blankets and hats; etc. No need to say that it was a very intense period of preparations!

Once we headed up in the mountains, after a week-long trial period we cached all our modern gear and we therefore had to rely exclusively on our stone age gear. I am glad to say that the transition was really not that big of a deal, maybe because we had already made most of what we were going to need; I imagine that if we had had to make all our tools and other articles from scratch with only stone age means it might have been a different story. But who knows. It was actually great to have a very streamlined existence, living very simply and, therefore, needing only the bare minimum.

We learned a great deal while up there, and gained a lot of respect for all the elusive animals who shared our environment. After some trial and error we also got quite good at fishing with our primitive gear and that was fun. There was not a lot of new food to gather at our location but we had all brought about 35 pounds of dried foods and it was a perfect amount for a month. We had plenty of food and it was nice to be able to remain active the whole time, not suffering from hunger.

Overall, it was a good experience that confirmed my hypothesis that we can live very comfortably at the stone age level, and also taught me a lot about what kinds of other projects I would like to participate in. I think that in the future I would like to spend more time at locations that have plenty of foods to be gathered, rely exclusively on these foods while gathering (except maybe for a few very basic staples to start with), and preserve enough to see if we could survive the winter months on what we collected.

In the meantime, if you are interested in participating in a similar stone age project or if you simply want to take classes that would prepare you for such an experience, visit Four Seasons Prehistoric Projects.